The Accidental Tourist

Ridiculous, when you thought about it: Macon hated travel. He careened through foreign territories on a desperate kind of blitz- squinching his eyes shut and holding his breath and hanging on for dear life, he sometimes imagined-and then settled back home with a sigh of relief to produce his chunky, passport-sized paperbacks. Accidental Tourist in France. Accidental Tourist in Germany. In Belgium. No author's name, just a logo: a winged armchair on the cover.

He covered only the cities in these guides, for people taking business trips flew into cities and out again and didn't see the countryside at all. They didn't see the cities, for that matter. Their concern was how to pretend they had never left home. What hotels in Madrid boasted king-sized Beauty-rest mattresses? What restaurants in Tokyo offered Sweet'n'-Low? Did Amsterdam have a McDonald's? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell?

Did any place in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli? Other travelers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon's readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk.

As much as he hated the travel, he loved the writing-the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remained in neat, terse paragraphs. He cribbed from other guidebooks, seizing small kernels of value and discarding the rest. He spent pleasurable hours dithering over questions of punctuation. Righteously, mercilessly, he weeded out the passive voice. The effort of typing made the corners of his mouth turn down, so that no one could have guessed how much he was enjoying himself. I am happy to say, he pecked out, but his face remained glum and intense. I am happy to say that it's possible now to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in Stockholm. Pita bread, too, he added as an afterthought., He wasn't sure how it had happened, but lately pita had grown to seem as American as hot dogs.

"Of course you're managing," his sister told him over the phone. "Did I say you weren't? But at least you could have let us know. Three weeks, it's been! Sarah's been gone three weeks and I only hear about it today.

And by chance, at that. If I hadn't asked to speak to her, would you ever have told us she'd left you?"

"She didn't leave me," Macon said. "I mean it's not the way you make it sound. We discussed it like adults and decided to separate, that's all.

The last thing I need is my family gathered around me saying, 'Oh, poor Macon, how could Sarah do this to you-' "

"Why would I say that?" Rose asked. "Everybody knows the Leary men are difficult to live with."

"Oh," Macon said.

"Where is she?"

"She's got a place downtown," he said. "And look," he added, "you don't have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You're supposed to take my side in this."

"I thought you didn't want us to take sides."

"No, no, I don't. I mean you shouldn't take her side, is what I'm trying to say."

"When Charles's wife got her divorce," Rose said, "we went on having her to dinner every Christmas, just like always. Remember?"

"I remember," Macon said wearily. Charles was their oldest brother.

"I suppose she'd still be coming, if she hadn't got remarried to someone so far away."

"What? If her husband had been a Baltimore man you'd have gone on inviting them both?"

"She and Porter's wife and Sarah used to sit around the kitchen- this was before Porter's wife got her divorce-and they'd go on and on about the Leary men. Oh, it was the Leary men this, the Leary men that: how they always had to have everything just so, always so well thought out beforehand, always clamping down on the world as if they really thought they could keep it in line. The Leary men! I can hear them still. I had to laugh: One Thanksgiving Porter and June were getting ready to leave, back when their children were small, and June was heading toward the door with the baby in her arms and Danny hanging onto her coat and this load of toys and supplies when Porter called out, 'Halt!' and started reading from one of those cash-register tapes that he always writes his lists on: blanket, bottles, diaper bag, formula out of the fridge . . . June just looked over at the other two and rolled her eyes."

"Well, it wasn't such a bad idea," Macon said, "when you consider June."

"No, and you notice it was alphabetical, too," Rose said. "I do think alphabetizing helps to sort things out a little."

Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you'd find the allspice next to the ant poison. She was a fine one to talk about the Leary men.

"At any rate," she said. "Has Sarah been in touch since she left?"

"She's come by once or twice. Once, actually," Macon said. "For things she needed."

"What kind of things?"

"Well, a double boiler. Things like that."

"It's an excuse, then," Rose said promptly. "She could get a. double boiler at any dime store."

"She said she liked ours."